


Three Interviews with Patients at the Arkham Asylum for the Criminally Insane, or: What Floats Your Boat, My Sweet?

by scuttlesworth



Category: DCU - Comicverse
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-21
Updated: 2013-04-21
Packaged: 2017-12-09 03:28:31
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,231
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/769451
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scuttlesworth/pseuds/scuttlesworth
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Patient interviews for three female inmates on intake. Interviews may be atypical due to repeated intake/escape dynamic. Security review of the facility is warranted. Oh, it's so green. Did you see? It was green - something moved in the undergrowth, it looked at me. I think that it has claws. It does not love me, no, it loves the taste and that's not the same thing at all. </p><p>You witch, you witch; you touched me and this is what has become of me. You remake me and say that we remake ourselves; liar, oh, there is no self in self-determination... </p><p>End Tape. </p><p>Interview notes: Intern who conducted the interviews is remanded to the custody of the facility until such time as his condition can be determined to have been caused by environmental toxicity or some expression of a pre-existing mental or physical condition.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Three Interviews with Patients at the Arkham Asylum for the Criminally Insane, or: What Floats Your Boat, My Sweet?

Ivy

I hate the modern world. There is no air in all the concrete, steel glass towers chemicals raining down on us all. We wither in this prison we have built. Look at the children, pallid, fat and wheezing, growing under artificial lights. You know I would do better. They would grow lean and strong under my care, brown as bark from the natural sun, hair a snarl of untidy roots waving in the air, uprooted from this despairing bitter soil. 

You call me poison; surely I am the cure? You are already sick, dying in fact; the seeds I plant will live forever. I touch you and your skin reacts, red velvet prickles break out along the path my fingers took. Look at how your body reacts to mine, each cell changing, growing, developing. So what if the mind you call your own dies - something new will take its place, something beautiful, something living. That’s not death, then. Rebirth. The only true rebirth there is in this world. 

Swamp Thing mourned his state. What a fool! He was blessed. He was the Green Man, the god, my god whom I worshipped with all my heart. With my body, my mind, the rising sap in my veins - and I watch as they drain his wetlands, blood trickling away, their steel cages on wheels pushing the skin of the earth around gouging and tearing - my mother, my mother, they murder you. 

What good and dutiful daughter would not wish to kill those who struck out at the world which gave her life? What idiot psychopath attacks the things that make air? You shit in your own home and cry when I bring bleach. 

I will strangle you. We are patient and long-lived; do not think that prison walls will hold me for all eternity. Roots break stones the world over. 

 

Cat

It’s not about the money. It’s all about the line. 

It’s the line of your arms, your head on your neck, your spine, your pelvis, your legs. It’s the line of sight from your eyes to the window and the street to where you stand, in the rain, on the edge of a building ten stories up with no safety net except your own balance. It’s the math of it, the arc and sine of the thin thread that you shoot into the wall, the tension of it as you pull it with your body weight, sliding down in the evening when people don’t believe what they see in the air. Clouds, shadows, it’s just a leaf. It’s a line in the mind. 

It’s the line from being a child to being a woman. From hearing the teacher say demi, demi, gran plie to saying flexibility, like a cat, your spine should arch to darling, you’d be perfect for the part but you have no passion. Show me some passion. While his hands are all over you, not like a teacher, and you’re a whore, you know you are, you take on customers for parts. They pay for the privilege of watching your body twist and writhe on stage. So you go to a strip club and audition in a mask, and you’re better than anyone else there, you own them. And it’s power. You have them. 

But you don’t want them. They’re a sad pathetic thing to own. Their stuff - that’s different. Watches, rings, wallets. You see them waving around fat wads of cash while gold glitters on their chubby fingers. Strip club, box at the ballet, they’re all the same. Overfed, never starved for anything in their lives. So you take a little, and it’s like soda in your veins, it fizzes and burns and makes your breath come short like nothing else ever has. 

That’s a line crossed, then. 

Like a cat. Cat burglar. Stray Cat, Catastrophe, Catalog of Sins, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Cat of Nine Tails, Cat of Nine Lives. Shed your fur and run away to the streets, rather be alive and alone in the mud and filth than dependant on all those clapping hands and leering eyes for a soft bed in a cage. You leave the audience behind and go on the road, learning your trade. The audience are fickle anyways. Gold and diamonds - well. Those are faithful things. They never talk. 

Buy your own life. That’s a line too. 

 

Harley

I never wanted that life anyways. The one with the white coat and the letters after my name, it was all because something was missing. Something big and important, something primal and powerful. And I was looking for it in a room with little cages and mice. Ha. 

It was so boring. So small, so regimented. Up at the same time every day from the moment I hit high school through college through grad school through working at the institution. Same thing, every day: get up, calisthenics, coffee, toast, school, lunch, school, home, supper, read, sleep. On the weekends it was study, work, work, work.

And there was never any change, and there would never be any change. Never ever ever. Everyone said how good I was. A good girl. A good doctor. So good, all the time, and I was screaming inside and never knew it. Some psychologist! Physician, heal thyself... 

It was my life. My responsibility. And I was failing at it, drowning, and I didn’t even know. It took someone else to show me. To hold up a mirror and say, what do you see, Doc? The water’s up to your cheekbones. I can’t even see your lips because you’re sinking, down, down into the darkness, and there’s nobody to save you, they’re all patting you on the head and shoving you under and you’re dead and gone. Bones, bones... 

And he said it and I saw it in his eyes. I saw for the first time and - and I wasn’t alone. The things in the dark, that I was so desperate to avoid, I looked at them and saw him seeing them and he saw me and he smiled, he always smiled but not like this. Not like then when he showed me and knew I saw it too. 

He was alone before too. All alone. You think he hurt me. You think he broke me. It’s not like that. He was standing there in the darkness on his boat screaming, like a venetian while the city sinks, and everyone’s pretending it’s all ok while they sit there with water coming up their dresses and suits and the champagne glasses glittering in the candlelight as they all drown, the bodies of the people in the basement are already floating up and you say “pass the butter” while things move under the table, between your feet. Dark things. And he’s out there trying to show you all this sewage you’re swimming in and you lock. Him. Up. 

Nobody else sees it but I do. I do. And I can’t leave him alone. Not there, not in the drowning city, the flooding alleys with the corpses floating past with their dead eyes and the rats riding them like little barges. 

So I go with him, wherever he goes. And sometimes he’s not ok. Sometimes I can see it’s driving him insane. Sometimes I can’t follow. 

But I try. And he sees me, and he knows he’s not alone.


End file.
